Caveat Emptor, Labour Voters!

A government policy to create 100,000 new nursery places using spare capacity in English primary schools is “unlikely to work”, according to research. The research blames a geographical mismatch between capacity and demand, while leaders in the sector have raised concerns about staffing, the provision of sleep areas for the youngest children, toilets that are too big and sinks that are too high for nursery age children.

Another Labour campaign promise spirals to the ground in flames, like a novice pilot in 1918 who tried to tackle Von Richthofen... 

The success of the policy is critical as the government is under pressure to create sufficient places to fulfil its promise of 30 hours of free childcare a week for eligible parents of children aged from nine months to three years from next September.

And is it not gouing to meet that anywhere? 

FE says London is the only region where spare reception space will meet and could exceed additional demand for nursery places, as schools in the capital’s rolls fall due to a declining birthrate. Elsewhere, only a small proportion of projected demand will be met by spare capacity – just 13% in the East Midlands, 25% in the east of England and 32% in the West Midlands.

Ah. Well, to Starmer's mob, no doubt London's all that counts, so they'll probably simply declare victory regardless.  

And The Welsh Government Is Just Daft Enough To Try It, Too....

The Welsh Government has been advised to create dog-free zones to help make the outdoors “anti-racist”. Labour’s devolved administration has pledged to rid Wales of racism by 2030, and set out a plan to ensure “all areas” of public life were transformed.

According to a report submitted to the Welsh Government to steer “anti-racist” policy, dog-free zones should be created to make the outdoors more inclusive.

I know what you're thinking Reader, I thought so too,  but don't be hasty... 

The reason for this is not elaborated on in the report, which will be used by the Welsh Government to “support policy teams” who are “developing and implementing” anti-racist plans for Wales.

Actually, it is. Be patient.  

On the basis of reports provided to date, the Welsh Government has concluded that ethnic minorities face “barriers” to the outdoors created by “exclusions and racism”.

Barriers to outdoor activities includes the perception that growing food in gardens or allotments is an activity “dominated by middle-aged white women”.

No idea why that would keep them out, according to almost every advert I've seen so far, marrying a white woman is a goal! 

Climate Cymru BAME, along with groups polled to inform the anti-racist policy, suggested that ethnic minority residents could be directed to “community led” food growing groups to mitigate the issue.

And by 'community', they don't mean those run by Becan or Carys. But back to those dogs... 

A separate set of recommendations submitted by the North Wales Africa Society suggested that “dog-free areas” should be created, explaining that during its focus groups “one black African female stated that she feels unsafe with the presence of dogs”.

One. ONE!?! Truly, we live in the age of the Tyranny of the Minority.

The report also noted that others kept “seeing dog fouling on the floor”.

Given how ethnic minorities often live in their home countries (Ed: yes, I've been watching 'Snakes In The City' and a black mamba in those kitchens isn't the biggest poisoning risk in the house...) , how exactly is that a problem? 

And what about all the sheep, cow and rabbit poo that litters the countryside? 

H/T: Skipster via Twitter

Removing Personal Responsibility

...and replacing it with woke rhetoric:

Civil servants were told to rewrite a proposed social media campaign to combat drink-spiking after the original appeared to blame victims, a minister has told Labour conference delegates. Alex Davies-Jones, the minister for violence against women and girls, suggested that Whitehall encouraged a “culture of victim blaming” and should instead focus on stopping perpetrators.

What exactly did it say? 

At a fringe event on Sunday at Labour’s conference in Liverpool, Davies-Jones said she refused to accept the script her civil servants had drawn up ahead of an awareness campaign that was due to coincide with freshers’ week at universities. “The civil service brought me my script for talking about this on social media, on TikTok, trying to bring in the youth,” she said. “One of the things they wanted me to talk about was how we keep ourselves safe from spiking – ‘cover your drink, make sure you look out for your friends, don’t accept a drink from a stranger’.

All perfectly reasonable, no? Exactly the sort of 'be cautious!' warning you get everywhere these days. Pretty unremarkable:

So why exactly is the Minister so agin' this?

“I refused to do it. I said we need to start reframing this, stop this culture of victim-blaming. If you want to go out and enjoy yourself, you should just be able to go out and enjoy yourself and not have to worry about keeping yourself safe. ”

So, on that basis, are we getting rid of all the warning signs to beware of phone thieves? Those ones that tell you to keep your mobile out of sight? 

She said that instead she ordered civil servants to go back to the drawing board and draft a campaign script that warned perpetrators not to spike or face prosecution and get treatment for their behaviour.

Because the sort of people who do this won't do it if they see a poster warning them not to... Is she drunk? Or just another Labour idiot promoted well beyond her capabilities?

Her approach mirrors a new strategy to tackle rape, known as Operation Soteria, under which police officers focus on the rape suspects’ behaviour and previous sexual activity rather than investigating the credibility of the victim.

Well, that's not a policy that's going to backfire, I'm sure!  

‘Gruelling’..?

A prospective Labour candidate finds it's not all wine and roses...

A gruelling schedule of door-knocking to drum up local support for candidates was encouraged, and the campaigning expectations completely took over my life. My hours were tracked mercilessly in an app by the local campaigning team that fed them back to the regional bosses.

To be fair, when you're young and naive, that probably does feel like a gruelling slog... 

In the run-up to an election, you are expected to complete five two-hour sessions a week, with an extra weekend session every fortnight on top, alongside your day job.

But she won. And then the real 'problems' started.

The real issues started when I had to go back to my day job. Being a councillor is not a full-time role, and it was one for which I took home less than £13,000 a year, despite my rent alone being £11,000.

Which if you already had a job meant your rent was paid and you had an 'extra' £2k on top of that, as well as your day job salary, doesn't it? 

A typical day would involve using my lunch break to join a council meeting on my phone and then after work, picking up a sandwich for dinner on the way to a three-hour evening meeting that would often overrun. The next evening or weekend would be more campaigning, meeting a local group or holding my ward surgery.

And it didn't occur to you that this would happen? Did you think they'd invent several hours more in the day for you to do this? 

When I was eventually signed off work with exhaustion, the mental health practitioner told me I needed to spend more time with my friends and family. But when?

You had no clue what it was going to demand of you? And that's someone else's fault, of course.

If You Get The Very Basics Wrong, Why Should We Listen Further?

Carole Cadwalladr on the riots:

"The 1996 Dunblane massacre and the outcry that followed are held up in the US as a textbook example of how an act of terror mobilised a country to demand effective gun regulation.The atrocity, in which 16 children and their teacher were killed, provoked a wave of national revulsion that, within weeks, led to 750,000 people signing a petition demanding a change to the law. Within a year and a half, new legislation had outlawed the ownership of handguns."

But Carole, we still have gun crime. So really, how effective was it? It stopped some innocent people enjoying a legal hobby, and the thugs and criminals went right on doing what they do...

Almost 30 years on, the horrific violence visited on a dance class in Southport has sparked a very different reaction. A reaction that shocked many in Britain this week but which experts in domestic extremism – and especially those who look at the intersection of violence and technology – say is all too depressingly familiar. And in this, our new age of algorithmic outrage, depressingly inevitable. “We’ve always had radicalisation, but in the past, leaders would be the bridge and bring people together,” said Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist and trenchant tech critic who won the 2021 Nobel peace prize. “That’s impossible to do now, because what used to radicalise extremists and terrorists is now radicalising the public. Because the information ecosystem is designed that way.”

Ah, so now we must ban the Internet? I think that's going to prove a tougher opponent than the target shooting community... 

The question is what Keir Starmer will do.

The wrong thing, of course! Since this whole thing started, he's unerringly done that every single step of the way. 

Ebner points to the fact that this is no longer about dark corners of the internet: politicians are among those who have been radicalised. “They now say things that they would not have said previously and use dog whistles to the far right, flirting with conspiracy myths that used to belong to fringe far-right movements.”

And now everyone can see that they actually had a point after all and that the conspiracy is out in the open. No wonder people like you, Carole, are shitting themselves at no longer being able to control the narrative... 

It Depends On Your Definition Of ‘Petty Offences’, Of Course

For those unconvinced that prime minister Keir Starmer really wants to fix Britain, look no further than his appointment of James Timpson as prisons minister. Timpson, chief executive of the eponymous family business best known for shoe fixing and key making, is not an MP and has been parachuted into the job by Starmer with a peerage and a seat in the Lords.

His qualifications for the role?

As for Timpson, he is a businessman and chair of the Prison Reform Trust, with an outstanding track record of supporting ex-offenders in work and a commonsense radicalism in his approach to justice.

The Prison Reform Trust does what it says on the tin: it campaigns for reform of the prison system. Rather than jailing more people, this means jailing fewer of them. It means not giving custodial sentences for petty offences to parents who shoplift to feed their children or to people with drug and mental health problems who should be getting support in hospital or the community rather than being jailed, when their problems invariably get worse, sometimes to the point where they take their own life.

It means not introducing a bill that could criminalise homeless people for smelling.

Which no-one actually did, of course!

The bill defines “something that is a nuisance” in relation to a person who “causes or does something capable of causing damage”. A section of the criminal justice bill defines that damage as including “excessive noise, smells”.

Which can mean leaving behind offensive smelling rubbish, like these charming people in the middle of our capital. Which our police seem to do nothing about despite the law being their's to uphold.

On Channel 4’s Ways to Change the World podcast in February, he cited the Netherlands as a good example of what prison policy should be like. “They’ve shut half their prisons. Not because people are less naughty in Holland – it’s because they’ve got a different way of sentencing, which is community sentencing. People can stay at home, keep their jobs, keep their homes, keep reading their kids bedtime stories – and it means they’re far less likely to commit crime again.”

Or is that 'far less likely to get caught again'..? 

In that interview, Timpson said a third of prisoners should definitely be jailed, another third should probably not be there and “need some other kind of state support”, while for the final third prison is “a disaster … because it just puts them back in the offending cycle”.

And for some people, that cycle is their culture and nothing will break them out of it, so the periods they spend in jail is the only surcease their long suffering neighnourhood gets.   

At the Prison Reform Trust, Timpson has campaigned for resentencing as recommended by the justice committee in September 2022. This would mean that prisoners who have served their tariff would be released. Starmer’s Labour was not brave enough to support resentencing when it was in opposition.

Because they knew how unpopular it would be.  

As prisons minister, Timpson is now in the perfect position to show the way forward – to fellow ministers, to entrepreneurs, to the populists and bigots who want to see ever more people locked up.

Funny you should mention populists and bigots who want people locked up, Timpson. They might not be the ones you think you have to deal with in your new role... 

So, This Is A Step Too Far, Eh..?

School leaders have accused Labour of “window dressing” after Keir Starmer pledged to introduce...

...supervised toothbrushing for young children in England’s primary schools.

While the policy has long been supported by the dentistry profession as a way of curbing decay, headteachers said it was not appropriate for their staff to check whether pupils had cleaned their teeth.

It's not appropriate to check what parents are sending in for a packed lunch either, but that didn't stop them, did it?

Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “We have serious reservations about how such a policy could even work. It is not the role of teachers to be making sure children brush their teeth each day.

“Schools already play a role in teaching children about the importance of looking after their teeth through the curriculum, but there has to be a limit in terms of what we can expect them to do.

“We should demand more than window dressing from all of our politicians.”

Oh, be quiet! You've already meddled in things that were the purview of parents, you can hardly claim it's not your role now... 

The British Dental Association, which represents the profession, said it was encouraged by Labour’s proposal, given ministerial inaction over introducing a similar scheme.

So, have the hapless Labour brains trust decided there's more votes to come from dentists than from  teachers? Because maybe they shouldn't have let Diane Abbott do the maths...  

Are All Labour Councillors Thick As Mince..?

...or is it just this one? 

She was immediately - and beautifully - taken to task by Twitter users. But the breathtaking idiocy of tweeting something like this about people caught in the act astonishes me. 

The immediate assumption that 'racism' drove this, as it it would ever be racist to object to this sort of disregard for our surroundings, as if people wouldn't somehow be as angry if the people doing it were a different race. 

The Council Has Spoken, Peasants!

Bradford's Council has prohibited a new ITV drama about Peter Sutcliffe's murders, called The Long Shadow, from filming throughout parts of the city including streets and parks.

To shield the surviving victims and their relatives from further pain, I suppose? 

Emails reveal there had been plans to film the series in another part of the country, but victims' families 'thought it needed to be told in West Yorkshire'.

Oh! Well, then, why..? 

One email, understood to be from Bradford Council leader Susan Hinchcliffe, said: 'I'm not keen on us participating in anything that perpetuates the memory of the man, so the answer's no from me I'm afraid.'

Ah. But wouldn't it bring a boost to the area? 

The production company responded by trying to assure the council the series would not 'exploit or sensationalise the nature of his crimes'. It also offered to work with charities and support groups in the area...

However, a final email signed 'Susan' - sent in response to the matter being chased by New Pictures - says: 'I said no quite clearly I think?'

The breathtaking arrogance of that statement tells you all you need to know about how local council folk see themselves, doesn't it? 

A Bradford Council spokesperson, said: 'The story of this very dark and painful era has been told many times including within well researched documentaries which have given survivors and victims’ families a voice.

'We cannot ban filming in public spaces and have not tried to do so but we can choose whether to actively support this film or not.

'Out of respect for the many people affected, we have chosen not to support this film.'

So 'streets and parks' aren't public spaces? And the 'people affected' directly by these crimes have told you they want this? But your leader knows better...at least, she thinks she does.

That's Nothing Compared To The Damage It's Causing To Our Political Elite!

Angela Rayner warned today that the ongoing culture war over gender rights is causing 'damage' to young people - and it is unacceptable to ask a trans woman if they had a penis.

The Labour deputy leader struck a conciliatory tone as she said that women-only spaces should be protected at the same time as people changing gender should be supported.

Good luck with squaring that particular circle, Angie baby! Of course, it's all an attempt to row back after her boss showed his lack of fortitude:

It came after her boss, party leader Sir Keir Starmer, yesterday refused to say if a woman can have a penis during a debate about trans rights. 

Asked if a woman can have a penis, Starmer told LBC yesterday: 'I'm not... I don't think we can conduct this debate with... I don't think that discussing this issue in this way helps anyone in the long run.'

It's certainly not helping your party, is it? Not that the Tories have anything to boast about on this score, either... 

She was asked about Liverpool's Walton Centre NHS Trust, which has begun to ask all men whether they are pregnant before undergoing scans. The procedure can affect unborn children. 

Ms Rayner said there will be circumstances where it is reasonable to ask a trans man if they are pregnant, but added: 'It wouldn't be a reasonable question for me to say ''Have you got a penis or not?'' because that's not acceptable. She said the issue is not about 'men coming into women-only spaces', it is about 'supporting people in their lives'.

That's not all she says:

So shut up, peasants, and let Ange decide the hard issues of the day!
 

I Thought This Would Be Bigger News...

The former Labour MP Jim Devine has become the third parliamentarian to be jailed over the expenses scandal after being sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment.

The 56-year-old former trade union convenor made false claims totalling £8,385, "knowing full well just how wrong it was and the effect that false claims were having on the public's belief and confidence in parliament", Mr Justice Saunders, passing sentence at the Old Bailey, said.

I guess he's lucky there's a war on, eh?

Devine's offences were "less serious" than those committed by the former Labour MP David Chaytor, who received 18 months in January, and were committed over a shorter period of time, Sanders said.

His defence tried his best:

The offences were "entirely out of character" as he was a "man of integrity and honesty", though Millar accepted that might sound like a paradox.

Well, no, 'paradox' wasn't the first word that came to mind, actually...

Right Headline, Wrong Answer...

 

Faced with a deluge of evidence that months of lockdown, patchy school attendance and a digital divide had widened attainment gaps between better and worse-off pupils, the 163 English grammars put their heads down, ploughed on, and managed to run just about the only examinations that took place last year.

Well, hurrah! Something more to celebrate, surely? 

Well, no. Not according to Fiona. This is the 'Guardian', after all...

Does anyone in government care? It seems not, and this is hardly a topic likely to fire up the prime minister, whose nauseating observation about IQ testing was to suggest that humans were innately of unequal ability, and like cornflakes in a cereal box. “The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top,” he explained in the 2013 Margaret Thatcher lecture, which is certainly an interesting take on the concept of “levelling up”.

Does Fiona believe we are all born equally able, then? 

The 163 grammar schools may seem like small beer at the time of a national emergency, but for every selective school there is a larger local group of secondary moderns, a school type no one is campaigning to bring back.

They might not be, but is the answer really the wrong one? Only if you think that the key to the 'equality' you supposedly seek is to ensure no-one has the provable chance to better themselves... 

You Wouldn't Know 'Justice' If It Slapped You Around The Face With A Wet Haddock!

Social media users should not be allowed to post from anonymous accounts, the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales has said.

What?! Who on earth would say such a stu... 

Dame Vera Baird QC...

Oh. Right.  

...said tech giants such as Twitter and Facebook should not allow people to sign up without providing accurate identifiable information. It comes amid concern the practice is allowing people to abuse others online with little prospect of being identified and prosecuted.

I can post a poison pen letter that's untraceable. I can use a 'burner' phone to make threatening calls. When do you start demanding these avenues be closed down too?

And why, on any subject, should someone too dim and arrogant to scoop her dog's crap be able to shoot her mouth off and be listened to?

Dame Vera said: “I think that getting rid of anonymity is fundamental to being able to enforce the law quite obviously.”

Well, there goes all that whistleblower legislation, eh? 

“People sit at home with a funny name and say the most horrible thing, having quite a lot of pleasure because they can’t be found - that must be the point of it, mustn’t it, to do it without any comeback.”

Like politicians can, in the House? 

“It’s very unpleasant indeed and it’s imperative they be brought to justice.”

Like speeders should?